


Pave

by tkayo



Category: Pact - Wildbow
Genre: Alternate Ending, Alternate Universe - Canon Divergence, Alternate Universe - Post-Canon, Canon Continuation, Gen, Nonbinary Character, Post-Canon
Language: English
Status: In-Progress
Published: 2019-11-12
Updated: 2019-11-12
Packaged: 2021-01-29 07:22:38
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: Graphic Depictions Of Violence
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,531
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/21406372
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/tkayo/pseuds/tkayo
Summary: Rose nodded.She turned her attention to me.“Damn it, damn it, damn it,” she said, reaching down to break, digging for the flesh that remained.Then all went dark-- and Lyn Thorburn wakes up with two sets of memories, and a very angry fish monster at their throat.(A Pact alternate ending, where things go worse but at least we're not pretending it's happy)
Comments: 7
Kudos: 13





	Pave

**Author's Note:**

> so hot take, but I don't like Pact's ending.  
I don't like how abrupt it is, I don't like what happens to Blake, I don't like how it treats it like it's a happy or content ending for him, and I especially don't like how we don't get to follow up with literally any of the other characters.  
So here. This isn't quite a fix-fic - it's 50% that, and 50% an alternate ending, because I thought that could be neat.  
Also it's not important for the fic so it's probably not gonna come up but I'm working under the HC that the original Thorburn heir was transmasc nonbinary, cause it just makes too much sense.  
Also also, Lyn is non-binary, they/them pronouns.  


**Notes for the Chapter:**

> CW: minor misgendering from Green Eyes, but its unintentional and non-malicious

_Rose nodded.  
_

| 

_I nodded._  
  
---|---  
  
_She turned her attention to me._

| 

_I turned my attention to him._  
  
_“Damn it, damn it, damn it,” she said, reaching down to break, digging for the flesh that remained._

| 

_“Damn it, damn it, damn it,” I said, reaching down to break, digging for the flesh that remained._  
  
_Then all  
_

| 

_went dark-_  
  
The very first thing I ever saw was a paid of cerulean eyes, directly in front of me.

I jerked back with a yelp, banging my head against the wall. "_Gah_! Green!" I yelled. 

The eyes blinked and drew back slightly. 

"B-Blake?" the mermaid whispered.

"_What_?" Evan screeched, swooping in front of my face. "Blake?! But- you- _what?!"_

I held up a hand, rubbing at my newly-acquired lump with the other and wincing. 

"I'm… not Blake, no." I hadn't thought about the words before speaking, but they felt right. 

"Oh." Evan sounded so… deflated, and it made my heart ache. "Sorry, Rose. I just thought…"

"I…" I stopped, trying to process his words, and the intuition they set off. "I don't think… I'm Rose, either."

Evan finally came to a stop, settling down in Green Eyes's shoulder. "I am _so confused_."

"You and me both, nugget," the mermaid muttered. "You're… the original, then?"

I went to reply in the affirmative, but stopped, following my gut again. "No. I thought I might be, but… no. That doesn't feel right."

I couldn't read Green Eyes's expression, and Evan was a bird. "Who are you, then?" she asked, voice dangerously quiet. 

I held up my hands, inspecting them. "I think… I think maybe I'm someone new." The hands, poking out of the ruined tatters of Rose's blouse, weren't _familiar_, but they were _right. _Not Blake's callused workman's hands, or Rose's, slender and ink-stained, but somewhere in-between.

The realisation that I could _remember _that came a second later, and with it, a deluge of fractured memories. Blake in the left eye, Rose in the right, like they'd both seen when the other was dominant. The memories were damaged, even more so than when either of them had seen them, but they were… _stable _in a way they hadn’t been before. Like a certain degree of erosion had been a consequence of shoring things up.

That thought resonated in my mind, but Green Eyes’s voice cut through it before I could follow it to its conclusion. “Did she know?” she asked, in that same, icy voice. “Is this…”

Memories sprang to mind, called automatically by her words. The split vision, staring up at Rose and reaching down for Blake, the tearing, the darkness, the consumption. Then, no longer visual but still somehow bifurcated, a swell of complex emotions, confusion and pain and loss and fear, on both sides. Then, anger, then the memory of my - their - selves being ground away, then- realisation. 

“I don’t think it was going to work,” I said slowly. “What they were planning, it wasn’t working, they were too damaged. What the Barber had done, it was…” I was still processing the memories, speaking as I figured things out. “They thought Rose could use Blake to shore herself up, but they were both too far gone. So they…” I ran out of words, the well of instinct running dry for the first time. “They _made _me, I guess. Like- they were both damaged eggs, too damaged to repair, but I’m- an omelette, I guess.” 

On cue, my stomach growled. No surprise why I’d landed on that metaphor, then.

“So…” Evan started, still sounding confused. “You’re like… Blake and Rose’s kid?”

Green Eyes snarled quietly, and I quickly shook my head. “No, I don’t… I don’t know what I am, but I have both of their memories. What was left of them, anyway.”

“So you’re like… a clone of both of them? Or like, if they got mashed up in a teleporter, like in that old movie with the Jurassic Park guy?”

The memory that surfaced was bifurcated again, split vision of two different scenes. Apparently, Blake and Rose had both seen the Fly, at separate times. 

I covered the wince with a laugh. “I don’t think there’s an easy answer to that, Evan.”

“Blake said he used to have tattoos,” Evan said. “_Cool_ ones.”

“He did,” Green Eyes confirmed. “They were. I saw them when-”

“-we met for the first time,” I finished without thinking. 

Her eyes narrowed. 

“You remember the Abyss.” 

It wasn’t a question.

“I…” Technically, we were still _in _the Abyss, but I knew that wasn’t what she meant. “Yeah, I do. Meeting you, the black fish. You offered to do what the guy who had saved you did for you, if I fell in, but I asked you to kill me instead.”

“_No_,” she snarled, teeth snapping together. “_Blake _did that. _Not you._”

I flinched. “...right. I’m sorry, it’s just… I remember it as something I did, and it’s hard to… disentangle it all.”

She seemed to accept that. At the very least, she no longer looked like she was moments away from attacking me.

Hesitantly, I pulled back one of the sleeves on Rose’s old-fashioned blouse, exposing the arm underneath. Sure enough, the birds and branches were there, spiralling up my arms, the colours faded like I'd had them for years. 

The leaves on the trees, though, were a pure, bright white that I instantly knew every artist I'd ever met would _kill_ to achieve. I remembered, from that same fractured perspective, Blake and Rose staring at each other in their - _my _\- fractured mental landscape. Blake, tangled in wood; Rose, Conquest's ivory flowers. 

I could feel the connection to the Incarnation still, if I reached for it, but it was small and vaguely confused. At a guess, it had made a pact with Rosalyn Thorburn, and she didn’t quite exist anymore. But then again, if I was an entirely separate person, then the bond should have broken entirely.

I was presumably still a practitioner - I could see Evan, after all - so I took a calculated risk. 

“I am the Thorburn Heir,” I said aloud.

No karmic penalty, no cosmic backlash. Good to know. 

“_Cooooool_,” Evan breathed, looking at the tattoos. “Can birds get tattoos? I want tattoos! Blake, can I-”

Green Eyes hissed, and he flinched back. 

“Right, right, sorry. Do we call you Blake?” Evan asked. “Rose?”

Green Eyes growled. “I am _not _calling her Blake.”

It took me a second to connect that she was talking about me. “I wouldn’t ask you to. I think… if I’m still the heir, then that means I’m still Rose to some degree. Rosalyn, I guess.” A continued lack of reaction told me I was on the right track. “I’m going to keep her responsibilities, at least - the oaths she made, her obligations. There’s too much at stake.”

“Rosalyn’s a pretty name!” Evan chirped. “Rose never liked us calling her that, so it won’t be confusing.”

I made a face at ‘pretty’, without really knowing why. “...I don’t think so. Maybe… Lyn?”

Yeah. That felt right. Better than Rosalyn, at any rate.

“Lyn,” Green Eyes said, as if testing it out.

“Oh, I like that too!” Evan fluttered around my head. “There was this character called Lyn in a game I played ages ago, and he was really cool: he had fire magic and could do really awesome kicks!”

I chuckled. “That’s a pretty high bar to live up to, then.”

“Nah, if you’re _half _as cool as Blake, then you’re still really, _really_ cool!” He let out a gasp. “_Does this mean you get Blake’s motorcycle?!_”

_The wind in my hair, the thrum of the engine in my chest, the feeling of freedom..._

“_Yes_,” I said emphatically. “And if I don’t, I’m buying a new one anyway.”

“_Yessssssss.” _

“It’s not like anyone else is going to be using it,” Green Eyes pointed out. She’d calmed down some, but I could still feel her watching me when I wasn’t looking. 

"Wait wait wait wait." Evan was still fluttering around my head, but not as frantically as before. "Are you a boy or a girl, then?"

I shrugged one shoulder. "Neither, I think."

"...that's an _option?_"

“Yep,” I said. I was very confident that it was true, but I couldn’t seem to summon up any reasons or examples. I leaned on my intuition again. “You can ask Alexis about it, when we get-”

Even as a bird, I didn’t miss Evan’s wince. 

“What?”

“She’s gone,” Green Eyes said, not sounding particularly torn up about it. 

“Oh,” I said slowly. I didn’t need to ask what ‘gone’ meant. Bits and pieces were starting to come back - the sheer grief and despair on my friend’s face as she disappeared from sight making my heart ache. “She fell, didn’t she.” 

“I’m sorry,” Evan said sadly. “I thought you remembered.”

Instinctively, I held up a hand, and he fluttered down to perch on my fingers. I smiled, and as if the action of doing so sparked the neurons in my brain, I had an idea. 

“Nothing to apologise for. I’m a scourge now, remember?”

Evan’s eyes lit up. “You mean-”

“Yep,” I nodded. “We’re gonna summon her back.”

**Author's Note:**

> I do have more ideas for this but I can't guarantee it'll be more than this one-off currently, so subscribe but don't hold your breath - think of the vibe as like 'and the adventure continues' for now


End file.
